Speakers - Alvar Aalto Foundation | Alvar Aalto -säätiö EN

William J.R Curtis

William J. R. Curtis is a historian, critic, artist and photographer. Educated at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London and Harvard University, he has taught at many universities including Harvard and Cambridge where he was Slade Professor of Fine Art. His best-known books include Modern Architecture Since 1900 (1982, 1987, 1996) and Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (1986, 2015), both widely translated and referred to as ‘classics’.

Curtis has published on a vast range of other subjects and has contributed critical essays in the Architectural Review, El Croquis, A+U, ARK (Finland), the Times Literary Supplement and London Review of Books, among others. Long interested in Finnish architecture, he has published seminal texts on Alvar Aalto and Juha Leiviska in particular. Curtis’s drawings and paintings, Mental Landscapes, were exhibited in the Museum of Finnish Architecture in 2000, and his photos, Structures of Light, in the Alvar Aalto Museum, Jyväskyla, in 2007. In 2015 a retrospective was held in the Palace of Carlos V of the Alhambra: ‘Abstraccion y Luz/ Abstraction and Light: Paintings, Drawings, Photographs by William J. R. Curtis’ with an accompanying book.

Curtis has received several awards, including the Gold Medal of the National Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts (USA), 1999; a 50-year Commemoration Medal from the Museum of Finnish Architecture, 2006; and the Médaille de l’Académie d’Architecture, 2022.

Henriette Steiner

Henriette Steiner holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge and is Professor in the Section for Landscape and Planning – Society at the University of Copenhagen where she currently serves as Head of Section.

Her research is on the history and philosophy of architecture. Recent books include Tower to Tower (with Kristin Veel, MIT Press, 2020), Touch in the Time of Corona (with Kristin Veel, De Gruyter, 2021), and Untold Stories – Women Gender and Architecture in Denmark (with Jannie Bendsen and Svava Riesto, Strandberg Publishing, 2023).

She is a recent recipient of a Monography Fellowship of the Carlsberg Foundation and together with Svava Riesto, she is currently co-PI of two research projects: Stories from Sofiegården: Alternative Forms of Living in Copenhagen as Cultural Heritage (funded by Augustinus Foundation) and Learning from Collaboration – Building Future Practice (funded by the philanthropic association Realdania).

Scott Wall

Professor Scott Wall, RA, is a registered architect, author, artist, and teacher. He has taught architectural history, technology, and design at Rice, Georgia Tech, Tulane, and now at the University of Tennessee. His research and creative work centers on the study of Finnish architecture and design culture.

He studies architecture broadly, as a medium transmitting cultural history through visual narratives, using text, physical and digital mapping techniques to find ways in which mapping can be used to provide ways to and graphically convoy meanings of the history of the Finnish city and Finnish land.

Wall was a Fulbright Fellow to Finland in 2003, studying the Finnish architectural competition, and in subsequent summers has served as the Residency Director of the University of Tennessee’s College of Architecture and Design’s Finland Summer Architecture Institute in Helsinki. He has attended seven of the Alvar Aalto Symposia since 2000.